It's common knowledge that I'm nocturnal. So if any of my friends or
family members are really upset about something and need to talk to someone, they come to me. This is
all well and good if they need to talk to someone in the middle of the night for an hour. If they need
to talk to someone for seven straight hours however, this becomes a problem, because you run out of night
and I need to get some sleep.

In other news, The Exorcist is honestly pretty overrated if you ask me.

hi my name is mark and i have lost the manual for dragon force on sega
saturn and i need the data on who is good at killing dragons, soldiers,
e.t.c as the grid was in the manual and ive forgotten who's good against
who.
Please e-mail me the actual grid from the manual please if it is possible
our just making one yourself our please give me the information.
thanks mark

Googleshng:
I maintain that you can honestly ignore troop strengths if you're good enough at timing spells and troup
commands, but here's the chart for you.

* Great, + Good, = Average, - Bad, X Terrible

Use \ Against

Soldier

Cavalry

Mage

Samurai

Archer

Monk

Harpy

Beast

Dragon

Zombie

Soldier

=

-

+

=

+

+

-

+

X

-

Cavalry

+

=

+

+

+

-

-

-

X

-

Mage

-

-

=

-

=

-

*

-

X

+

Samurai

=

-

+

=

+

+

-

+

+

-

Archer

-

-

=

-

=

-

*

-

X

X

Monk

-

+

+

-

X

=

-

=

X

*

Harpy

+

+

X

+

X

+

=

+

-

-

Beast

-

+

+

-

+

=

-

=

X

=

Dragon

+

+

+

X

+

+

+

+

=

+

Zombie

+

+

-

+

*

X

+

=

X

=

Telling someone they're totally off base here.

There is a secret character named Gyro on Chrono Trigger, right? He's made of fire? He wields a great axe? Right? Just tell me if I'm totally off base here.

Googleshng:
I hear the weirdest rumors about secret characters in Chrono Trigger. There are 7 characters in the game.
Two of these can be argued to be secrect characters, as you can win without them, but that's something
of a stretch, and if you've played the game, you know who they are. In the interest of avoiding spoilers
for the two people who haven't played it, I refer of course to the person you lose towards the end of
the game, and the cool floaty person here. Any other weird secret characters you hear of are baseless
rumors.

Working for a Living

Working Designs... I think that they've managed to stay alive by
charging $60 for every game they sell...

What, that wasn't the answer you were expecting?

I know another way Working Designs saves money. Look at the Playstation
Lunar 2: Eternal Blue. There was a lot of dialog reuse from the Sega CD
version. They only completely redid one voice: Hiro's.

While we're on the subject of Working Designs voice acting, it's really
weird hearing a lot of the voices you recognize from Lunar 2 in Popful
Mail. I'm pretty sure that the people who played Jean/Ruby, Ghaleon,
and several other familiar sounding ones that I can't place, are in
Popful Mail.

With that thought, I leave you.

P.S. I forget... what is the date of All Slimes day?

Googleshng:
February 30th.

Charging a tad more than average is balanced out by the cost of throwing in hard bound instructions and
punching puppets and all the other weird little extras they like to throw around. There might be a slight
bit of extra profit in there, but I'd think it'd be balanced out by the whole one release every two years
or so bit. You have something of a point though with the issues of salary though. Doing all your voice
work in-house saves a bundle I'm sure. In any case, I'm glad their brand of obsessive dedication to solid
low profile games works for them as well as it does.

As far as voice acting overlap goes though, I agree. To this day I'm creeped out when I win Dragon Force
and see Teiris speaking with Nall's voice.

Chrono Trigger has multiple endings!

Andrew said Aerith dies and I just started playing FFVII!!!

Well, not really, I played the game maybe three or four times already, but
don't you think a spoiler warning was in order?

Zohar Gilboa

Googleshng:
While it's generally a good point to avoid spoilers even on ancient games in my book (see above), if
there's anything which is past the statute of limitations here, it's this. Not knowing that one by now
isn't even living in a cave. It's more like being the grandchild of someone who lived in a cave his whole
life, had it collapse, and was forced to form his own little society and raise a family with no contact
with the outside world for decades.

Voice acting

Ahoy,

It seems to me that the translations are ten times worse when voice actors are involved. For example: the need to say "besides" every second sentence, repeating the last word in a sentence the other character just said in the form of a question. And then you get your just plain horrible voice actors, who range from too enthusiastic to zombie-like. As a side note, I'd like to thank ever person who voice-acted the role of a zombie. Hearing the voice of your favorite character is nice, but when it the story and the personality of the character are at stake, I'd rather read.

P.S.- Someone said (implied, maybe) that Xenosaga is a prequel to Xenogears. Shut up, fool. Get out from under Mr. Rock and go read official statements.

Googleshng:
Ack, let's not get into the whole prequel/sequel/remix/retelling/new take on an old concept bit here again with the Xeno games please.

Anyway, on the subject of translations, I'm going to have to strongly disagree with you here. First off,
when it comes to voice acting in games, while it's true you have some rough spots here and there ("Ha!
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!"), voice acting in games is one thing that this country honestly seems
to do a whole lot better than Japan if you ask me. Take Disgaea for instance. The Japanese voices are
really nothing to write home about, but stateside we get a team of seasoned pros who have been doing this
sort of thing for decades and really do a fantastic job. Well, some more than others. Specifically Captain
Gordon. Or if you want to branch out into other genres, look at the Metal Gear Solid games, or Vice City
there.

The other issue of course is that I've simply never seen a game with voice acting come close to some of
the most horrific translations out there. There's no voice acting in Wild ARMs 2. Nobody stepped up to
a mic for Illusion of Gaia's sake. Let's play money making game is pure text...

Now, if you want to talk about the merits of having voice acting in the first place, that's another story.

The Last Laugh:

So yeah, voice acting. It can add a lot of emotion to dialog when it's done well, but when it's bad
it's horrific. It eats a lot of disc space if you use it all through a game, but it drastically improves
my odds at picking the right choices in Sakura Wars. Funny thing that voice acting.

Oh, and before I forget, you might want to bookmark www.kekkai.org/google/
because I'm seriously considering starting some sort of daily weirdness on there this week.